Yesterday's Sins

Book 0: The Road to Redemption

by James Green

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Thrillers; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Charlie Bronski, US Air Force security expert turned successful cookery writer, now lives the quiet life with his wife beside the sea in Denmark. So why would anyone plant a bomb under his car? Recognising it as a professional job, Charlie asks for help from the people who set him up in his new life. They want a favour in return: for him to kill a middle-aged man, a trainee priest who caused them some problems ? surely an easy task for someone with Charlie?s military training. But that man is ex-copper, ex-criminal, Jimmy Costello, a man with powerful friends ? and powerful enemies. Will Charlie's past catch up with him before he catches up with Jimmy ? and will Jimmy make it through alive? The third in James Green?s critically acclaimed series featuring his hardboiled former London detective.

Release date: August 4, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 243

Sample

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The man was standing still, his hands out of sight in his overcoat pockets, motionless among the steady stream of travellers who filled the station concourse. He was looking towards the table where Jimmy was sitting and Jimmy felt sure the man was watching him. How long had he been there? Jimmy took a slow drink of his Tuborg. If the man was on his own maybe it was nothing, just someone standing, looking, waiting for somebody. But why me, thought Jimmy, why look at me? Then another man arrived and now they were both looking. Jimmy felt his stomach tighten and he stiffened. Should he get up, leave, head for the nearest exit? Then he relaxed. What was the point? They had him spotted and had shown themselves; any chance of getting out of the station building was already gone.

That was the problem with being on the run: you were never actually going anywhere. You moved around and didn’t stop until you thought you were safe. But how could you know you were safe? You couldn’t. You couldn’t know for sure if they were still looking or if they’d stopped because they’d decided you didn’t matter any more. You could never take the risk, all you could do was run. Jimmy took another drink and looked at the two men. Or you could do the other Thing: stop running and wait until they finally came and it was all over.

Now they’d come.

The men exchanged words and began to walk towards him. Jimmy watched them coming. Which ones will it be? But it didn’t really matter, the end result would be the same whichever they were. Then two women walked past the bar. The men smiled and one of the women waved. They met and moved off together and Jimmy, watching them go, realised his mouth was dry and took another drink of his Tuborg.

The bar was a glass affair inside the main concourse of Copenhagen Central Station. He came here because it was convenient, near the shops and the church. The station was always busy, so he could disappear into the crowd. You could come for a drink most days and, if you changed bars, never become a ‘regular’; you could sit and drink and watch the crowds and remain anonymous. He liked the station; a big, florid, Victorian-style building which would have been gloomy except that it had been filled with shops, bars and cafés. They added brightness and colour and stopped it being somewhere just to wait or pass through. They gave it a life of its own. The place seemed to sum up what he had seen of Copenhagen in the months he had been there. Solid and sensible but with plenty of life and style. A happy, well-ordered place for a happy, well-ordered people. A safe place where a tired man could rest.

He took a drink of his beer. The Tuborg had come as a pleasant surprise when he had first tasted it. He knew the name, of course, had seen cans of it in supermarkets at home, but had never been interested in trying it. He felt sure it would be just another gassy lager brewed under license in the UK. When he’d tried it here in Copenhagen he liked it. It was his beer of choice now. He looked at his watch: just gone half past one, time to get back for lunch. He finished the beer, bent down and picked up the carrier bag full of shopping and left the bar.

The main station entrance was a suitably grand affair facing the Tivoli Gardens but Udo’s house was five minutes’ walk away behind the station in the opposite direction, so Jimmy left by a humble rear entrance. He crossed the road, turned left and headed for what was now home. The street was quiet, almost deserted. This was hotel-land – modern, inexpensive hotel-land, where people on package tours and weekend breaks stayed. During the day they were out seeing the sights. It was at night that it lit up and came to life. Jimmy walked on. Beyond the hotels a few girlie bars began to appear and the buildings became older and a little shabby, a sort of grey area made up of big, dark turn-of-the-century apartment blocks with shops, offices and bars at street level. Not totally respectable nor completely sleazy or run-down. A sort of Danish Soho, but on its best behaviour and wearing a Sunday suit.

Holy Redeemer Church with its attached priest’s house was in a side street. It was slotted in between an old office block and a storehouse of some sort. When Jimmy had first seen it, he got the impression that when it was built Catholics in Denmark preferred to keep a low profile. The church matched its two neighbours in style – an ugly, depressing building, certainly not a joyful celebration of the Universal Church.

Jimmy let himself in, went through the house to the kitchen and put away the groceries. Then he went to Udo’s study. He couldn’t hear him talking to anyone so he went in. Udo was doing paperwork at his desk. He was about Jimmy’s age, fifty-something, but where Jimmy was of middle height, thick-set, with a crumpled look, Udo was a big man and looked fit for his age. His short grey hair might have given him a military appearance if he hadn’t been wearing a black shirt and a priest’s Roman collar. Udo looked up from his papers and smiled at Jimmy. He spoke good English but with a strong German accent.

‘Time for lunch already? I lose track of time, though God knows why, I don’t enjoy wading through this stuff.’.

‘I made ham sandwiches before I went out, they’re in the fridge. Do you want me to microwave some soup as well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which sort do you fancy?’

Udo shrugged. ‘Whatever comes to hand.’ Jimmy turned to go then Udo stopped him. ‘Not mushroom. I don’t like mushroom.’

‘I’ll see what we’ve got. I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

‘Thanks.’

Udo went back to his paperwork and Jimmy went back to the kitchen. He looked in the store cupboard and found they had four tins of mushroom soup and no other kind. Then he heard the phone ring in the study. They lunched late. It was a time of day when people phoned so they ate when everyone else had gone back to work. He went back to the study and waited until Udo’s voice stopped.

‘It has to be mushroom, or I can do beans on toast, if we’ve got any beans.’

‘No, make it the soup, we’ll have to eat it sometime.’ Udo picked something up from his papers and held it out. ‘There’s a letter for you.’

Jimmy didn’t take it.

‘I’ll get it after I’ve sorted lunch.’

‘It’s postmarked Rome.’

‘I see.’

Jimmy took the envelope and went to the living room. He sat down at the table and opened it. There was no address at the head of the unsigned handwritten letter.

I’m afraid I have bad news for you. There have been enquiries made recently concerning your whereabouts. Exactly who was making the enquiries is unclear but from the way they were conducted it seems likely that it was an Intelligence Service. As promised, there is no official record of your time spent in Rome. Everything I have access to was erased. But, as I said to you before, memories cannot be erased so if any of the men you knew when you were here were asked then your presence will have been confirmed. I cannot make enquiries myself as that would certainly arouse suspicion. You should do nothing, you are probably safest where you are. You can put full trust in Fr Mundt. Needless to say if anything further comes to my notice I will endeavour to inform you as soon as possible.

There was no signature but he didn’t need one. He took the letter into the kitchen, found a box of matches and burned it, then crumpled the ashes to dust over the waste bin. He washed his hands and went to the fridge, lifted out the sandwiches, collected a couple of spoons and took them through to the living room. Then he went back and got started on the soup.

So, they haven’t forgotten me, they’re still looking. He wondered which ones it was, but it didn’t really matter, one was as bad as the other. Was he safe here? That didn’t matter either because he had nowhere else to go; he had run out of places to hide. He left the soup and went back to the study and called to Udo, ‘It’s ready. Do you want coffee or beer?’

‘Whatever you’re having.’

Jimmy went back to the kitchen, got two glasses and two bottles of beer and took them to the table.

He thought about the letter – not that there was much to think about. What will happen, will happen, and when it did, it would have to be dealt with as best he could. Just get through one day at a time. He ladled the soup into bowls, took them through and sat down, then poured his beer and waited. Udo came in after a couple of minutes, sat down and poured his beer, said a quiet grace and began his soup. He didn’t refer to the letter. Letters from Rome were none of his business. They ate their lunch in silence. Jimmy was like Udo, he didn’t like mushroom soup either, and the beer was some sort of Pilsner from the supermarket. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t Tuborg. Oh well, sometimes you just had to settle for what you got. Some days it was bad news from Rome, mushroom soup and an indifferent Pilsner. You just had to make the best of it. So Jimmy ate his lunch, drank his beer and made the best of it.

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Six eggs! Surely six was too many? Six eggs, six tablespoons of sugar, one cup of black breadcrumbs, ground cinnamon and butter.

Hmmm. Was it too rich?

More to the point, was it vulgar?

Nothing vulgar could ever be allowed in an Elspeth Allen cookbook. The name was right though. In fact the name was damn good – Black Bread Pudding. It had a ring to it. Something that had grown out of grinding poverty and, over the centuries, matured into a dish fit for the tables of the affluent and discerning.

What about three eggs and three tablespoons of sugar? Charlie looked at his watch. Half past seven. It was Sunday, the day Elspeth gave herself the treat of a long lie-in. She wouldn’t be up for another hour. Time for a cup of tea and then back to it.

Charlie Bronski put aside being Elspeth Allen, got up from his desk and went to the kitchen. While he waited for the kettle to boil he thought about the recipe. Three eggs, three sugars and what? It needed something. The answer came just as the kettle boiled. Alcohol. But not just any alcohol, Polish vodka. Perfect. Booze was always good, people liked booze, and Polish vodka was bloody brilliant.

He returned to the desk with his tea and resumed work on the latest Elspeth Allen cookery book, Poland in an English Kitchen.

He wrote out a provisional list of ingredients. At least it didn’t have cream. It seemed to Charlie that half of the recipes in the old second-hand cookbook he was plundering needed eggs and cream. And this was from the Soviet era when even bread was supposed to be scarce! What a bloody country! Not that excess was bad. Excess was usually good. The success of the books he wrote in his wife’s name was based on the simple idea that readers, while reading, liked to feel good. And reading an Elspeth Allen cookbook did more than make you feel good. It made you feel rich. For a while, in your head, you became a part of the glitterati, the fashionable dinner-party set.

Charlie stopped writing for a moment. The sentence that had started it all drifted back into his mind. His wife had come across it in an old Victorian gardening manual she had bought and when she came on it she had to stop and read it out loud to him.

‘No matter how small your garden, do try to keep at least one acre for trees.’

From that single sentence Elspeth Allen’s ‘The World in an English Kitchen’ series had been born.

Charlie smiled. Maybe this black bread thing could use a touch of that sentence, a touch of naive extravagance. He reached out to the bookshelf, pulled out a copy of Tanners wine catalogue and turned to the Gin and Vodka section. The entry chose itself immediately, nearly jumped off the page at him – Wisniówka cherry-flavoured Polish vodka. He looked in the right-hand column. Pricey for vodka but with a perfect name, just what he was looking for. If he couldn’t do something creative with that, he’d bloody well eat his own Black Bread Pudding.

He put the catalogue down and got back to work. After a while he heard the bathroom door open and close. Elspeth was up. Soon he would have to stop, but he still had time to get a bit more done. He looked back at the yellowing page of the old book and read aloud.

‘Line the buttered pan with breadcrumbs.’

Line it how thick and, if any thickness at all, how do you make the ones not held in place by the butter to stay up? Or does it mean just line the bottom of the pan? He sat back, annoyed. He hated it when the recipe he was stealing made it difficult for him. He tried again but the problem remained. How thick, and how would you make the bloody things stick?

He decided to give up and closed the book. It was almost time to finish anyway, he would sort it out later from another book. He looked at the cheap, plain black cover. It was just bad writing. It failed the first and greatest rule of all ‘How To’ books – always assume your reader has the intelligence and initiative of a retarded field mouse with emotional problems. Spell it all out, every single step, spell it out so even a moron could follow it.

Oh well, he’d deal with the breadcrumbs when he had a go at the damned thing. He began to close down the computer.

‘Morning, darling. Am I making something nice?’

Charlie turned round. Elspeth stood in the doorway in her dressing gown with disordered hair, holding a mug in her hand.

‘Not really, this is for your new series, “Recipes to Poison Hated Relatives With”.’

Elspeth pulled a face.

‘Oh no, I can’t have that.’

‘And why is that, my love, have you no hated relatives?’

‘Plenty, but I can’t have an Elspeth Allen book where the title ends with a preposition.’ She came to the desk and looked at the screen of Charlie’s computer. ‘Will I like it?’

Charlie pressed a couple of keys and the words disappeared as the computer shut down.

‘Not really, it’s got six eggs and you serve it with ...’ He opened the old book at the bookmark, ‘“whipped cream or whipped sour cream.” I knew it. Cream. It always turns up somewhere.’

She took a sip of tea and looked over his shoulder at the recipe.

‘Black Bread Pudding. But surely black bread is made with mud or something? Not even six eggs and whipped cream could redeem mud.’ Elspeth took her tea to the settee and sat down. ‘It doesn’t sound much like the upmarket stuff I usually dish out. Still, it’s your book and you always seem to know what you’re doing. You’d better start getting ready or we’ll be late.’

Charlie closed his laptop, tidied his desk and got up. He knew Elspeth liked to be early for Mass. There was only one Sunday Mass, said in the small function room of a local hotel which, many years ago, had been bought by a French couple. Over the years the number of Catholics in and around Nyborg had grown until there were enough of them to justify a priest coming from Copenhagen to say a Sunday Mass for them. The French couple had gladly provided a venue but made sure the Mass finished just nicely for people to stay on at the hotel, have a drink, then have lunch. As the couple refused any payment, many of those who came to the Mass felt it only proper to stay for a drink or a meal. Charlie and Elspeth ate Sunday lunch there about once a month and, as the cooking was excellent, staying was never any kind of penance. By accident or design, the way things had worked out, the couple were well rewarded for their generosity.

‘Why can’t we have our own priest and use a proper church? Churches get shared these days. If we used one of the local churches maybe we could have Mass at a time that suited us. Not that I mind having to eat there but having to stop ...’

‘Oh, Charlie, don’t moan. I know you only became a Catholic to please me.’

‘No I didn’t. I became Catholic because you convinced me ...’

Elspeth got up and grinned at him. ‘That my father wouldn’t permit my marrying any non-Catholic.’ Charlie followed her into the kitchen. ‘And we’re lucky to have any kind of priest come to us. Nyborg isn’t exactly a Catholic place, is it. If Father Mundt didn’t come, it would mean going to Copenhagen or Odense. And here we get the bonus of Mass in English.’

Charlie put his arms round her waist as she washed out her mug and gave her a gentle hug.

‘Whatever you say. I’ll get the ingredients for that recipe out so I can make a start when we get back, then I’ll get the car out.’

He got out six eggs and the sugar. Start with what the recipe says and see how it goes. After he had collected everything he needed and put it on the work surface he left the kitchen and stopped by the door to the bedroom, where Elspeth was doing her hair.

‘It’s odd though, isn’t it?’

‘What’s odd?’

‘A German priest living in Denmark who speaks fluent English. Don’t you think that’s odd?’

‘Not really, Denmark hasn’t any native Catholic community to speak of, so the priests have to be foreign. And why not German? Germany’s just across the border.’

‘And I suppose everybody speaks good English these days.’

Elspeth turned from the mirror.

‘They do in Denmark. That was one of the reasons we chose it, remember? Now get the car out, or we’ll be late.’

Charlie walked to the hall, put on a light overcoat, then went back through the house and out the back door. He stood for a moment looking at the view. At the bottom of their garden, beyond the low fence, was a narrow band of rough grass and beyond that, the beach. It was a calm day with a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea and he could just hear the sound of wavelets gently lapping against the white sand. Beyond the beach lay a blue expanse –the Storebælt, the southern reach of the Kattegat which separated Denmark from Sweden and eventually led into the Baltic.

He loved this view. He loved the whole place. To his left began a wood where the pine trees came down to the beach. To his right was the strand, a favourite summer bathing and picnic resort of locals and visitors alike. Back from the beach was a line of neat bungalows, all looking across the sea to a hazy view of land peeping over the horizon. Beyond the strand, reaching out from the edge of the small town, was the Great Belt Bridge. From where Charlie stood, it looked so thin and fragile; a long ribbon barely above the water, held up by two narrow suspension towers. It grew smaller and smaller as it headed away across the wide channel that separated Nyborg from the neighbouring island of Zealand. The sun shone from a cornflower blue sky. Everything looked perfect on this fine autumn day.

Charlie felt happy. He decided that after Mass they would give lunch at the hotel a miss, come home, walk along the beach or through the woods and have a beer and lunch somewhere. He went round the side of the house to where it faced the road and opened the up-and-over garage door. He got into the car. Elspeth arrived and stood on the drive ready to close the garage door once the car was out. Charlie turned the ignition key. For a split second nothing happened. Then a voice came from the car’s sound system.

‘Bang, you’re dead.’

Elspeth looked round, startled, as the car door banged open and Charlie ran at her shouting.

‘Get back, get away from the car.’

But she just looked at him stupidly and didn’t move.

Charlie grabbed her and began pulling her away from the garage. ‘For God’s sake get away from the fucking car.’

Elspeth tried to pull away from him, shocked by his swearing and frightened by his roughness and his words. She began struggling to free herself from his grip when the garage dissolved in an ear-shattering explosion and they were both thrown to the ground.

The last thing Charlie heard before he hit the floor was Elspeth’s scream. Then a deep black pool opened at his feet, and he slid in.

––––––––

Someone was talking to him.

‘Stay with us, Charlie. Come on, stay with us.’

There was someone’s voice inside his head. Then the pain came and he opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on the drive. Three faces were looking down at him out of a background of blue sky. The nearest one smiled.

‘Thank God.’ It turned to the other faces. ‘He’s conscious.’ Then it looked back at him. Suddenly Charlie remembered what had happened.

Elspeth was standing by their neighbour Inga and her husband, Lars, who was kneeling beside him.

‘Look at me, Charlie. Do you know who I am?’

There was concern on Lars’ face and in his voice. Charlie felt like one big bruise but it was the pain in his head which was worst. He forced his brain to clear; he needed to know if he was really hurt.

‘Hello, Lars.’

Lars’ face split with a grin of relief.

‘Welcome back. You had us worried for a minute.’ Charlie tried to move but Lars held him. ‘No, stay there until the ambulance gets here. I don’t think there’s anything serious but don’t take any chances.’

Charlie relaxed. When he had tried to move there had been no serious pain anywhere, he was only knocked about. He didn’t have to worry. He could function, he could think, stay in control. He was going to be OK.

‘How long was I out?’

‘Not more than two or three minutes. We heard the explosion, came out, and there you both were.’

Charlie looked up at his wife. ‘Are you OK, Elspeth?’

Then he saw that she was quietly crying and her eyes had a frightened, faraway look. Inga, who had an arm around Elspeth’s shoulders, saw the look of concern on Charlie’s face.

‘Don’t worry. We think she may have broken her wrist when she fell. Otherwise she seems OK, except for the shock, of course.’

Charlie tried to get up again but Lars eased him back to the grou. . .